You can click to go to the article source on Google Books. It is entirely possible that this has long since been debunked as some sort of anti-Pagan propaganda that make it through certain credulity filters.
Despite passing out in a locker room last week, thus living out one of the more popular worst high school nightmares, last week proved fairly productive. I’m amazed how much I got to run a strikethrough on!
New to the list:
It can certainly contribute. But until I can unjam my garbage disposal, change the oil on my neighbors’ car, and get that noisy couple in the next hotel room to shut UP with a single post to my blog (and never have to in any way have a direct conversation or contact with any of these things/people) the blog is really something that will only have power if you have the right people reading it. Note: you need the right people reading it. Not everybody. The right people. There’s a difference.
Heresies, I suppose, to follow. This blog is arguably the voice of a Pagan moderate, especially since most of the time I would rather just toss it all and work some magic.
Since I am a moderate, usually people with more extreme views only receive the parts of the messages I send where I am not on their side. I am absolutely no absolutist – so I guess that makes me a fogey now. Even worse, I care more about solving and resolving than I do about winning. I consider this “only noticing the part that stimulates an emotional trigger” a failure of a maturity and of reflective reading/listening skills, rather than a failure of my own to communicate properly. There have been plenty people every time this has happened that disagreed with me 100% and understood me 100%.
While the Internet has made Paganism more visible, if not more accepted in all geographical areas, it has also seemed to induce a sort of amnesia: people have completely forgotten that talking about what bothers them is necessary – absolutely necessary – but doesn’t actually effect any desired changes, and only in specific forums where someone running it knows how to get people to go _afk for a specific purpose does anything progress. So slapping names onto one branch of a religious movement, or declaring people who practice your religion a way you don’t like not really your religion … just makes you sound like a blowhard or a troll. And in most cases, if you’re doing that, you are.
However, that also means that with all that blowing hard, when you’ve got a legitimate beef you’re going to invest a whole lot of mental energy insisting you’re right as though all the Internet is some sort of competitive game…and only reinforcing your own belief you’re right, and the other person’s belief that you’re wrong. Seriously – there’s scientific research about how pointless carrying on actually is. It actually prevents the people involved from making the changes necessary to resolve the problems they’re living with.
“Wegner and Ward tested this and found that access to the Internet increases cognitive self-esteem. Essentially, using the Internet to find answers made people feel smarter, even when they were answering incorrectly. According to Wegner and Ward, this is not an unusual experience, “the Internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory but also of our own cognitive faculties…The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before—when their reliance on the Internet means that they may know ever less about the world around them.”
Thanks to the Internet’s neurological impact, no one can see when they’re wrong anymore. If they get it wrong, going online will just reinforce their belief in their correctness even when not factually supported. Worse, no one understands the purpose of middle ground because no one has been on its metaphorical surface for decades.
There’s just so much forgotten – it’s painful to watch, and occasionally rather insulting to listen to, worse since the people talking about it expect me to passively accept that when they paint a multi-faith group of which I am a member with the same brush, they are directly telling me that I am also that insulting thing with no regard to my behavior and no awareness that not one Pagan alive today has interacted with the majority of Pagans – and that’s especially true of those involved in online communities, where roughly two thirds of modern Pagans refuse to engage, usually after competitive, argumentative, rude treatment that ultimately runs counter to a lot of neopagan spiritual values.
Here’s the thing… there are solutions to this. Some of them you won’t even have to go _afk, though most will be more effective if you actually do.
I am going to highlight a few activities/approaches that can help some of the inner Pagan/polytheist struggles, since most are actually resolvable with fundamental education. Awareness online is certainly step one, but it can never be the only step for sincere change or inclusion seekers.
Here’s a few methods I know of and have used that do help. These are not the only methods, by any means – I’m sure someone out there will have other, better ideas – or they may even have brand new ones that aren’t anywhere in my wheelhouse:
Problem: Too many people are assuming your faith, or rituals of your faith, or your values, are aligned with eclectic/populist Wicca.
(I find populist Wicca more accurate than Neo-Wicca, without the implied condescension. Populist Paganism, or Wiccan-centric Paganism conveys an accurate chiding of our collective bad behavior without resorting to aggressive insult. Well, I suppose no thinking Wiccan would like the association with Andrew Jackson but it still kinda works better than what’s used now.)
Online Methods
the good old days of USENET were a gods-send for those of us first starting on the Pagan path. They were also usually open source, or had their authors names and copyright at the bottom. If you are a small enough group you can get a single person or committee to write one, highlighting the main points of your faith. Too big a project for one person? Assign a group of volunteers one question at a time, with a deadline. Recommendation: agree on a documentation method before you start, and be sure to archive any online reference materials that you link to.
Here’s an example of the old-school Pagan FAQ. It looks like there’s no polytheist FAQ, nor is there one about indigenous religions. We need those.
Of course, the meta question is: great, how do we get people to read them?
Two ways: first, ask high profile Pagan bloggers to read and/or post.
Second, put it up on a page with low-quality, shady html and mark it “Free downloads!” There’s nothing that triggers a click happy person like the words “free” and “download” together.
Many are already doing this, but only broadcasting to people that are already in the know. In this case, I’m suggesting a technique that borrows from the convention model: get one person who is a trustworthy moderator. Deliberately get people of different faiths. Give each person a few minutes to talk about their faith practice tradition. Save it to Youtube and allow public embedding, so that lazy bloggers may repost at will. I did panels before the advent of Youtube – it’s pretty easy to do one online, though I doubt I’ll be on one with a Mennonite ever again.
If you’re on a Pagan forum or in a Pagan festival, people are going to assume you’re a populist Pagan of some sort until you speak up. Let’s just operate on the assumption of not-psychic until otherwise embarrassed with non-issued knowledge. Don’t assume they know. Don’t assume that if other person that practices what you do has met them that they will assume it’s the same for you. If that person is trying to guilt trip you into attending a ritual after you have politely declined, no need to be polite. Free will – and coming freely to ritual – is supposed to be one of those core populist Pagan shared values and the recent violation of it borders on evangelism, another explicitly banned practice. Practice a little empathy for those of us stumbling with cross-cultural rules of hospitality need a little give sometimes: I often invite not as an order but because it’s polite, and so I can let the person know that I support their right to decline. This isn’t eastern culture: invitations are not subvert orders.
Offline Metho
Pagan Pride events are great for this. You will get more crossover audience – the outsiders you need to reach – are best gained when you do a multi-faith panel. Always ask for a good moderator, even if you have to host a moderator training yourself to make sure you get one.
If you decide to go to a Pagan festival even though you are not interested in the rituals (hanging out is usually legitimate) be polite and assertive. You may need to write something on the form. Unless you are in some way disruptive to the festival there is no reason to bounce anyone out over that. There are some other issues that the festival circuit is working out thanks to the exponential growth of many of the most popular Pagan festivals. A lot of the populist Pagans see festival time as a weird escapist paradise. The presence of a non-populist Pagan or a non-Pagan polytheist messes with that vibe. That’s cool. That vibe needs to be killed because withdrawing into a fantasy world is just bad for everybody.
Tip: only allow people to attend the ritual if they go through a ritual etiquette course first. You will have a lot less problems if you walk people through it step by step before you do it. I would suggest merely doing an etiquette workshop or a comparison/contrast event focusing solely on ritual practices if you are, on the other hand, consciously exclusive.
Want to know why 2/3 of the Pagan community is offline and about half doesn’t go in for festival culture? Because we don’t fit with it, even if our spirituality might. The appeal of Paganism to some is the coming home, but for many of us it was finally finding somewhere that at least at one time took “no” for an answer. In my experience, festival culture people suck at hearing that “no.” I’m not asking festival culture to change – it obviously works for a lot of people. But I would like it if festival culture quit asking me, someone who is a populist Wiccan, to change, and would strongly advocate that festival enthusiasts start realizing that non-populist Pagans and polytheists that have drifted outside the tent should have their boundaries respected when they visit these fests.
I also want to add this: as in favor of free love as I am, when it comes to group identification or non-identification, there’s a point with non-populist polytheists where you do need to shit or get off the pot. If you want to be part of the overarching Pagan community, that’s OK – just understand that the Pagan community has always been a cultural one, not a religious one, and when discussing the problematic ways you’ve been treated, you need to talk about the specific behaviors, not construct overarching terms that willfully ignore entire diverse religious groupings. If you’re tired of all of it, just tap out all the way – you won’t lose real friends over this, even among Pagans, and if you are a real friend, you shouldn’t need to dump anyone over this, either.
Problem: Your personal sexual values conflict with the sexual values of others in your shared Pagan community.
This one is arguably resolvable wholly online:
I refer back to my “ask before you touch” policy. It may even be wise to ask if someone is OK with polyamory or prefers monogamy before asking for a date. True Platonic friendship is pretty cool – I recommend it.
Problem: Your organization or group has again tried to build a New Alexandria Library and had it fail or it is still struggling to get off the ground.
1) Stop naming these places New Alexandria library. I’ve seen at least four come and go in the past twenty years and I swear they’re all destined to go down in metaphorical flames the way the original library at Alexandria did in physical ones.
2) Get some advice from Library of Congress and the Rosicrucian Museum about building such a center and making it sustainable. Maintaining buildings and group continuity are the real mysteries of ceremonial orders we all want to attain.
3)Make sure you have one visionary, one task master, and one person who understands the necessity of reward – and make sure each one tutors at least three to five people in their skills along the way.
To speak to the things you might have to deal with along the way:
Manage Your Expectations
One of the most ludicrous moments I’ve had in recent years was when I mentioned I’d like to start a multi-faith Pagan fundraising foundation and I was greeted with, “Well, everybody won’t do that!”
…when did I say “everybody?”
Anyone who has done large or small group organizing already knows that there is a core group that participates and then there’s the majority, which will have people that drop in once in awhile. You don’t need everybody to get something done – you just need to work with the people that want to show up.
Meta Discussion:
I had already discovered that the more shocked or outraged someone looks at a change I propose, the more likely I am right, especially among Pagans. I was also vastly amused – I know from years of organizing that there is no cause, ever, that gets “everybody’s” participation and endorsement. That this woman assumed I would expect that was so hilarious to me that I had to go off the camera hangout to laugh.
Again, since I am actually in the majority of Pagans that stay offline except for basic relationship maintenance and employment, I had no idea that there was real context to her statement. There have been over the years a lot of projects that have sought funds solely because they are Pagan. Most did not have a clear mission statement, plan of execution, or serve a purpose that provided needed infrastructure based services to Pagans such as psychiatric counseling, emergency care, or elder care. Instead there are fundraiser to “help a Pagan family” (that often fail to explain why standard emergency services are not applied to) or to “help this Pagan center get built!” that does not have a plan and often turns into a glorified hangout for massage therapists and Reiki healers. You see, that’s a problem – what she didn’t understand because most Pagans don’t think like this, is that my idea of starting a foundation would solve exactly this problem. Organizations apply for grants from charitable foundations – grant requests are essays that include solid business plans, vision, purpose, etc. Anyone running a foundation would know that to give a grant, you would have to do one hell of a lot more than just be vaguely Pagan.
Paganism is coming to a schism that I can’t really think of a way to avoid. Some religions within it wish to be inclusive and others exclusive. I subscribe to the belief that our complex neurology influences our religious tendencies or lack thereof, and so I am for the time being assuming that this is not a situation that needs to be helped. There are some traditions that will exclude – and some that will include. Now, with that exclusion can, will, and has come injustice. You can’t – and absolutely do not have the right to – control what someone else believes, how they practice that, or whether someone else consents to practicing spirituality in that form. You can, however, ostracize any group that upholds unjust/hate based practices.
Meta: In one case I experienced myself and in another a woman related to me, she was interested in learning about Wicca and the group immediately wanted a dedicant commitment from her, including coven participation. She wasn’t looking for that level of engagement – she wanted something with less exclusivity. Be up front if you’re looking for dedicants and make it very clear what you’re expecting. This woman had answered an ad for a Pagan seekers group. Coven admission is not the same thing as a seekers group.
In the world of mature people, it’s OK not to be an expert on everything – and saying so earns you respect. Until you have interacted closely with a group or made a strong study of it, you can’t assume it’s the same as any other group. Stereotyping isn’t quite the right word for this behavior, but it’s very close.
It matters. So do you, so do they.
*Please note that to me, fat is not a pejorative. I am fat. I own my fatness. Taking the words out of the hands of the abusers – like taking the word witch, for example – and taking ownership is actively taking a weapon away from the people who use the word fat like it is one.
The more saintly a person makes him/herself out to be, the more likely that person is a liar. It’s one of those observations that come from years of practice, years of observation. It’s the ones that fall somewhere between “look at my perfect spiritual view of this” and “here’s today’s excessive confessional of all my pain, but I’m going to be vague about it,” that tend to be the genuine ones. I’ve noticed over the past ten years, the Pagan saintlies have added another to their list of “sins” to cast as aspiritual:
body size.
Because all of us who are larger should be feel very, very bad about it. Refusing to do so – or calling this behavior out as abusive – is met with rage. How could we be IGNORING the FACTS??? SCIENCE SAYS WE FAT PEOPLE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE – and the FAT PAGANS are KILLING THE EARTH!!!!
A few years ago, when I wrote quite plainly that the Goddess has never told me to go on a diet (she hasn’t)and that pursuing happiness was a stronger value than martyrdom I found a screed about how much that statement angered one person. I didn’t try to change minds at the time, although it was one of those roll-your-eyes moments for me.
She was an “armchair scientist” and the Goddess had told her to “reduce.” (Because apparently the Goddess speaks to her in the voice of a 1950s women’s magazine writer.) She also argued, drawing from a fat stereotype, that a person could just stuff his/her face with Cheetos and sit around playing video games and declare him/herself happy. I think the logical fallacy term for that particular logical fallacy is the Straw Man. Saying a person is happy does not mean that a person is happy. She willfully ignored that I had gone on to discuss happiness as an active principle of engagement.
This person, as an armchair scientist, is by no means a real scientist. She certainly did not quote any scientific studies or demonstrate any of her own while insisting that my understanding and experience is not valid. Even so, reading a lot of science books and articles does not teach you the disciplines of science. If you are going to argue “but science!” you need to cite the study. Not the news article about the study or the populist diet book from the mainstream bookstore. Cite the study. PubMed is available to us all these days.
I repeat: an armchair scientist is not a real scientist. While I have no problem bringing science into the discussion of the spiritual up to a point, if you bring it, you better bring all of it and give compelling reason and argument. Offense and “what everybody knows” is not and never has made for valid or useful dialogue.
Real scientists have their ideas and assumptions challenged and upended all the time. I live with one – a real live scientist who is also not Pagan and thus not invested in my worldview. I get a front row seat to this upending on a regular basis. A real scientist reading my statement would not have had a tantrum – s/he would have led with some questions and gathered some data. I would likely be told up front that his/her data did not support my contention. I might be asked to supply actual data.
A real scientist would have owned where the post she was bitching about came from so that she could consider it in terms of facts. But she went straight to the cultural stereotypes and straw men instead.
The thinking of this girl is part of a disease I’ve seen cropping up in spirituality books and talks I’ve witnessed with BNPs ((Big Name Pagans)) over the last ten years. Fat shaming has become a virtue among Pagans – and it saddens me to see us step into the mainstream on the shadow side. This is one of the rare areas where our old school counter-cultural values would be good to keep. It’s quite clear that fat shaming really only seems to make the shamed fatter, and all this “spiritual” advice about bodies is very much a disease in and of itself.
__________________________________________________________
Last year, someone’s death was used as an excuse to do some more public fat shaming – and I didn’t see any retractions when it came out that this person’s death had to do with a congenital defect in his heart and his body size had no impact whatsoever on that particular health condition. During the furor, I got approached by one person who wanted to tell me all about her “healthy lifestyle” under her fat-stereotype fueled belief that I must, as a fat woman, simply not know what good food choices and exercise habits looked like. I had already been warned that she’s quite the triangulator so I put her off – this wasn’t going to be a two way conversation in any case.
When I told her point blank I was NOT going to discuss it with her, then blocked her when I cut her off after she followed me across social platforms ((this is what we call crazy behavior – it does qualify as stalking, since she ignored that “no means no” also applies to her.)) She later used it as an excuse to start a fight and callout about it during business conducted that was completely unrelated. COMPLETELY. She even demanded an apology despite the new situation having no bearing or context on what she was demanding an apology for. That is what abusive behavior looks like.
My body size does NOT excuse her crazy, inappropriate behavior. No one’s body size justified the actions of another person, no matter what size they are or how offensive another person finds their appearance.
Her behavior is a classic example of how most fat people get treated: “no means no” magically doesn’t apply, even when it’s made clear that the answer is NO. Too many people convince themselves that our fatness makes us deserving of the abuse, makes the abusive behavior somehow not abusive.
IT DOESN’T.
In her mind, my boundaries were less important than hers. This is, again, a sign of abusiveness/mental illness.
She can defend how what she was doing was virtuous, but no matter how you cut it or how “concerned” you might be for my “health” ((do you worry about the health of all strangers? Almost everyone has something wrong…)) she was trying to force herself on me.
And I kept saying no.
She may have tried to argue that my life is in danger, I’m eating myself to death, my sedentary lifestyle will kill me. Of course she a)has never met me and knows nothing of my lifestyle beyond what I write here and b)if presented with the reality that I actually have a very active lifestyle (I do), she would dismissive it out of hand as untrue. She had decided what she wanted to believe about me – it was the core excuse for her behavior.
She then tried to force me to apologize for attempting to force herself on me by staging a semi-public tantrum.
This is what people on the Narcissistic Personality Disorder spectrum do – and it’s quite common for them to style themselves as “Very Spiritual” people.
I still have the same human and civil right to tell anyone to fuck off. Whether you’re right or wrong has no relevance in that situation.
I will be utterly unsurprised if there is a public temper tantrum about this post. Then you’ll know exactly who I’m talking about. Whatever is said, remember this: the entire tantrum started because I SAID NO. No further conversation has or will take place.
I don’t deal in narcissists if I can help it. Not anymore.
______________________________________________
What’s considered healthy in the western world is exactly like the word of Jesus: we’ve all fucking heard of it. Most of us over 35 Pagans have looked at the Good Word and found it problematic. The same is true of body expectations for any group at all.
I’ve been doing this a lot lately, and I know it’s just aging pains. But when I came to Paganism, there was not much in the way of body shaming. It was acknowledged certain people had different opinions about what was right for themselves; some were clear that they were not attracted to fat bodies, or that they weren’t and that was all OK. It was even possible to express such things without being a dick.
Perhaps because of the heavy feminist influences that happened in the 1970s, people I met at first were relatively fat positive ((this is not, as reactionary stereotypers are inclined to believe without asking, “yay, be fat!” It’s more of a yay! Don’t be a dick movement.)) It was a relief – I had had “your body is a temple” quoted to me alongside a pointed glare so many times in my church that I caught myself counting the calories in communion bread. The religious shaming just triggered my eating disorder, as all fat shaming is wont to do.
There’s a whole lot of but…but…but… going on. I haven’t even hit publish and I can hear it.
BUTT.((DELIBERATE))
Most Health at Every Size and Fat Positive Advocates likely disapprove of this following approach because human civility should be distributed to every person no matter how he/she may look. It should be entirely based upon how a person behaves. Of course, since so many people believe being shitty to fat people is a social good, moving all judgment of others to a behavior model would destroy the self-saintly congratulation locked in their heads whenever they yell “Fatso!” out a car window at the fat person who happens to being doing less to destroy the environment than themselves.
But – armchair scientist, here’s some reading for you – obesity is not just a single disease. Sometimes it is a disease. Sometimes it is a symptom. Sometimes doctors do not know why their patients get fat. Sometimes they do. Most put no effort whatsoever into investigating the causes even though sudden weight gain, like sudden weight loss, is a symptom of multiple serious diseases. The reason that fat people are so prevalent right now is because obesity has more than one cause, and the cause can be different in different people. The cause of obesity – not the obesity itself – is the indicator of whether the condition is life threatening. Obesity DOES NOT have a single cause and DOES NOT have a single solution.
Common causes of obesity:
1. Metabolic syndrome
These are people that like myself and my husband, have been deemed fat since early childhood. Some of this is based on legitimate measures, like weight and belly measurements. Others are social constructs about what we deem “too large.” Other factors in the home can make this condition better or worse. My partner’s parents did a pretty good job of going easy on him; I rarely if ever hear anything overly fucked up about body size or food when I visit his parents. Mike has lost 130 pounds over the past 2 years – but now he’s struggling again. This is not due to some failure of parenting, it is simple biology – and biological organisms are NOT as cleanly subject to thermodynamics as inanimate objects are. We’ll get to that further down. I came from one of the worst home factors you could have when you’re already a pudgy kid at age 4: my household growing up was verbally and at times physically violent. I was subject to fat shaming from age 4 on, in addition to the stress of just living there. This led to the next two conditions for me – as obesity can often come with many co-morbidities.
2. Eating Disorders (May be Extra Triggering)
Compulsive overeating isn’t rare in the west – and it’s also not exclusive to those of us who are fat. There are arguments that every woman in the western world has an eating disorder – just some of us don’t have much of a gag reflex. The mortality rates for bulimia and anorexia are much much worse than those for obesity. Obese people might die in 30 years, and given the research into the obesity paradox, the “you’re gonna die!” factoid is becoming less and less accurate. Not sure if you’re disordered, too?
If you’re not sure, take a notebook with you. Make a hash mark in one area for every time you think critically or enviously about another person’s body. Make another hash for how often you think about food and mark the time of day you have that thought.
At the end of the day, remove the marks made about an hour before your meal times. If you’ve got a lot of hash marks in both columns, you probably have a problem. Just like our culture trained you to have one.
3. Stressful environments
There is a unique sector of diet drugs on the market that are for lowering cortisol. If you read online reviews they either really work… or really don’t.
Cortisol is sort of the masterboard hormone: it regulates all the other hormones. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There is a cross section of fat people with elevated cortisol. I am one of them (an acupuncturist’s oh-so-professional estimation of my levels was “sky high.”) I grew up in a house with lots of shouting, lots of verbal abuse and lots of food as reward-and-punishment and I was the person everyone else took their stress out on. This triggered cortisol overproduction, which triggered protective fat storage. I spent a lot of time, even before puberty, with elevated cortisol because my adrenaline response was raised almost all of the time. Adults who came from homes of decent people find another place in life where this behavior is common, if often applied deliberately: work.
People that never gain the freshman 15 in college often wind up finding themselves gaining weight at a rapid pace once they take a full time job – and not even necessarily an office job. Crises are manufactured constantly, and whether it’s conscious or not, people bring food to share in workplaces a lot, consciously or subconsciously offering a comfort/self-medication behavior learned by those who developed eating disorders (but also as a means of gathering more office gossip to perpetuate traumas as “motivation.)
4. Eating too much, not exercising enough
I won’t deny that the world is far more sedentary than it used to be. When the Internet first became commonly available, I had a massive backslide from routine fitness to almost nothing… that I took steps to correct in recent years. (There is always more to going sedentary than simple laziness.)
The above factors – most of which can barely be helped and that need help that food education has nothing to do with – are far more common than that of simple gluttony.
True laziness is uncommon and is often paired with sociopathic behavior. I don’t see a lot of that among the fat, though I did meet one fat guy that qualified when I was in college in Wisconsin. The overeating/not exercising cycle usually sets in when someone takes that office job. For those that don’t get their cortisol levels elevated, it’s often a matter of time and timing – most corporate jobs want more, more, more of our time and have deadlines for non-crucial projects that are made out to be crucial. This – along with stressors – can be offset with cutting out processed foods in favor of large servings of plant life and regular exercise. The only real deterrent is the body’s reaction to a re-introduction to exercise after a long time without, and people not understanding that they can in fact make vegetables taste good without increasing fat content.
This is where adults who do not have metabolic syndrome encounter weight gain. For adults who do not have any other hormonal factors to consider – almost exclusively men – it is a simple matter of calories in/calories out and “taking care of yourself.” This is the only situation in which it is that simple and it is not the situation that most women have to deal with.
5. Hormonal Imbalance
This problem may have been resolved, but when I was 13 it wasn’t. We had one fat kid in junior high that we were explicitly told we were “not allowed to make fun of,” (thus tacitly telling the kids in my class the rest of us were fair game/encouraging the normal size kids to harass us.) He was on a kidney medication that kept him alive. Side effect: obesity. I remember that kid. He was a total dick.
There are also a slew of hormones-out-of-whack situations that affect weight. Many go undiagnosed because doctors are prone to fat stereotyping and don’t bother to investigate a patient or look for additional data points.
Among them:
*thyroid conditions
I have a thyroid that stays exactly on the border of “too low.” It’s low enough to raise concerns, but not low enough to justify treatment. This test only happened because my nurse practitioner saw me at the gym enough to NOT assume I am sedentary.
*pregnancy
We all know pregnancy hormones exist but it looks from here like the only real study effort has gone into understanding the effects of lactation. Since some women revert to their original metabolisms and others don’t, you’d think it would merit more study. But this is one of those problems that comes from placing a low social value on women before they get pregnant and after they’ve given birth.
*burning fat releasing wacky hormonal/toxin/allergen issues
I’ve been running into this one a lot lately, in ways I’m only starting to understand. Fat stores toxins. Burning fat also releases toxins.
I can always tell when I’m in ketosis because I am also usually breaking out in hives.
_______________________________________________________
“But wouldn’t diet and exercise solve most of these? Wouldn’t therapy fix the eating disorder?”
Short answer: no.
Long answer: complicated no.
Obesity is often correlated with other diseases, emotional and physical. But sometimes it’s a false correlation. Besides, CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.
For example, obese people develop diabetes and heart disease at the same rate that those of smaller BMI do. Not all obese people are diabetic – I’m not. Not all thin people are NOT diabetic. This tells us that while a number of people who are fat have diabetes, being fat does not cause diabetes. Certainly, however, being fat can make diabetes suck even more, since healthcare professionals have a reputation for really hating fat people.
Also, and here’s the evidence-based research fact that most people really do NOT want to accept:
Obesity gives absolutely no indication whatsoever as to the condition of a person’s health. There are obese people who definitely need some help with their problems. There are are also obese people who run marathons, eat clean and who, mysteriously remain fat.
In addition to the whole “fat” issue, there is also the serious problem of weight-loss recidivism. My husband, as a very small anecdotal and therefore not valid sample, has spent the last few years fighting to get every ounce of excess weight he could off his body. This meant 2-3 hour sessions on an elliptical, a running habit, a harsh and difficult to sustain ketogenic diet. Although his eating behaviors have altered and he’s very conscious of his exercise choices, the weight has started sneaking back on. It’s painful to watch. He is controlling what he can control – his behavior. But this is America’s Hunger Games. The odds are never in his favor.
But what is happening to him is what happens to nearly all people that go on these socially approved diets. 98% of people put the weight back on within five years, no matter what they do. .5% keep it off. .5% die. Chances of death increase dramatically with every lap band and gastric bypass applied.I prefer my husband be strong and healthy. If I can help him do this and be happy as well, I will.
Where do I fall in this? Somewhere in-between thanks to what we call “co-morbidities” i.e. multiple noncommunicable diseases in the same body. I have an eating disorder. I have PTSD. I have metabolic syndrome. I have an alarming number of severe allergies, to the point that allergy shots may be a help or a danger.
Rather than torture myself again with starvation to the point of IQ drop – what I did to myself as a teenager – I adopted the Health at Every Size philosophy. The basic philosophy is this: you can develop healthy habits no matter what size you are. Most diet systems just take you from one extreme – overeating and underexercising – to the opposite extreme: doing both. HAES starts and ends with moderation.
Notably HAES is the only diet approach to have minimal recidivism. Only around 7% of people going on it gain any original weight back. It’s not popular because it’s 1)dead slow and 2)actively discourages “before and after” pictures that make for good magazine ads. It’s the unsexiest of all diet styles.
It’s also a proponent of intuitive eating, mischaracterized by Dan Savage as “eating whatever you want.” The actual food plan of HAES is similar to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Real Food: “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.” But to get there you must learn to eat when you are hungry and stop eating when not by finding ways to notice when you are genuinely full. Our culture does not make that even a little bit easy – just go through the day and make a note of the pressures surrounding food with family, in groups, at the workplace. Don’t just note the pressure to eat – note the pressure of who to eat with.
_____________________________________________________
In my own case..
The effort to control my environmental allergies has in many ways helped my eating disorder. So has limiting my consumption of processed sugar with the same rules I apply to alcohol consumption (only once a week, with limited exceptions for special occasions.) Therapy really only works when you’re in an emotional situation that supports you getting well – so in my case, cutting off my abusers was the only way to get the help I sought to work. For me, the best medical professional is one who sees weight loss as a possible byproduct of medical treatment – not as the medical treatment.
I have added as many links to studies as possible. Hey, when I can, I give good armchair.
Paganism is one of those religious paths that typically welcomes science. But we seem to have lost the philosophy of “question everything” in many other areas – but the stuff about weight is what is most visible to me. This is unfortunate. Our trusted news sources aren’t so trusty anymore and that means in all things we have to reach further on our own to find out the truth as opposed to what we are told is the truth.
I may be shouting into the void on this one. That’s OK. Every so often, the void fills up.
In the late 90s and early ‘aughts, I had this Pagan community thing down. I knew what went on online in any semi-public Pagan community. I even enjoyed a membership to a few secret-ish ones. I got my initiations – yes, all three – and then two things happened:
Covens fall apart all the time. It happens.
Itching to be away from the limited job resources of my semi-rural environment, I moved to Minneapolis, taking a job with a local nonprofit. The job expected much – too much – and paid too little. Within two months of my move I developed a chronic illness and only came to a full understanding of their cause and how to manage the illness in the past two years.
While I did work with the Pagan society at the local university, I was constantly conscious not just of my age and experience difference but of my privilege difference. It had followed me through school but it was achingly obvious upon going to the U every week and watching white, middle class young Pagans with educational funds provided by their parents do things like present mangled, inaccurate descriptions of Islam and insist Tantric techniques used during my marriage “weren’t actually possible.” There was lots of drama, most unnecessary, all of it typical of the age range.
I also noticed that while people liked to research Paganism, few seemed interested in practictng it. It was a hobby, a curiosity, a way to learn but not necessarily a means of incorporation into life. It was during this period I came face to face with people in different Reconstructionist movements. They still fit the Pagan umbrella then – those that operated as sort of free-range Wiccans had yet to drive/push them out.
Hard polytheists don’t do it in circles. The problem is that so many others feel entitled to demand that they do.
It was valuable to me, to have not just my beliefs but my capacity for supporting beliefs I did not share challenged.
Then I drifted from the group and it eventually folded. A new U group rose to take its place. I stepped away from them – they were better off growing on their own terms; besides, after I crossed the line to age 30 I didn’t feel my presence was appropriate.
During that time I also helped organize Pagan Pride and I went to whatever public Pagan events and rituals I could. It was the same people in the community, often covering the same topics. It became repetitive in a deep and frustrating way: there is more material written and experimented involving both Pagan faith and occultism than any one person will ever cover in a lifetime. Yet here I was, in absolutely every corner of my Pagan life, repeating the same stuff over and over – not even new exercises on the same concepts. The same fucking exercises.
I also began running into the same social situation over and over: if a person had never seen me before, that person immediately assumed I was a newbie. I had all sorts of things explained to me without solicitation, both online and off. In a local occult shop I picked up an amethyst, only to have another person explain the stone’s properties to me with no inquiry as to my interest in the stone. I posted in a forum to ask about buying art dolls as souvenirs and got long, patronizing instructions on how to make poppets. Because I was not loudly declaring my authority and Very Spiritual life – people assumed I was new. If I said something about my background, I was called a liar.
Notably no one asked me to demonstrate my knowledge or ability. In the situations where I was called upon to do so, those who had questioned my veracity did not apologize when it became clear I do have some magical competency.
What really tore it for me was how I was treated during a crisis.
After my father died some bad metaphysical stuff happened. I had exhausted all of my own knowledge for dealing with it, I had sought counseling and I still needed help. When I asked for advice, after giving an extensive list of what I had done, I received two responses:
1)pushing me toward Reiki. I am saying it here: Reiki did not fix this problem. Reiki does not fix everything and I am quite tired of how pushy so many Reiki healers are about their practices. Note I am not dissing Reiki. There’s actually the threads of empirical research into its validity. I am, however, dissing the social behavior of many Reiki healers.
2) I had someone tear into me, saying if I was “really” initiated I would “know how to deal with these problems.” That there might be problems I could encounter outside of the Wiccan training I received was summarily dismissed – even though there are Wiccan trads that do not practice magic or deal in the metaphysical beyond God invocation at all.
These things alienated me from both the physical and the online community. When I got involved with my current husband, the attitude that I was somehow doing something wrong by marrying a non-Pagan clinched my feelings of alienation from the Pagan community.
All this and I have yet to attend a single festival or campout. I do not want to sleep under the stars with people who ask me what I did to deserve an aggressive haunting, or why I couldn’t wick the whole situation away with a flutter of a third-degree eyelash.
That and I hate camping.
But my faith in the God/ess has never been shaken. I am still Wiccan. I still believe this religion is my right path.
I just struggle a lot with the other people on it.
Now I often just do my own thing. I love writing about magic – almost as much as I love trying new magical approaches. But the only stuff I know about the Pagan community comes from some local friends who spend way more time on social media than I do. The way the conversation has taken shape while I was going through the process of tearing my life apart and putting it back together is almost like a foreign language now. I still absolutely believe in being supportive when someone converts away from Paganism; it’s happened before and it happens again. I’d rather see a person convert to a faith and be active then stay in a faith where they do nothing and gain no comfort or clarity from it.
I seem to have a fantasy relationship about Internet dialogue that began and ended with logic, with additional information, rather than with someone getting upset and defensive at my challenging their ideas.
Some of this is definitely the idealized memory of my youth.
But there’s definitely a conversation that’s happened when I was off going through what I had to go through. That convo has whizzed right past me. Maybe I don’t know where the club is. Maybe I just can’t stay interested in the conversations. I am definitely not kissing the right asses and I am unlikely to ever know which asses those are, or to ignore them if those holy buttcheeks present themselves to me.
It’s likely a combination of all of these things. So I have missed out – but often enough, I get the impression I am not missing anything at all.
Dancing Beyond the Circle | My Pagan Past(sycalaelen.wordpress.com)
101 Wednesday – Paganism(slacktivist.typepad.com)
The next most common question I get after the “so what’s a real witch, anyway?” isn’t a question, it’s a statement usually by someone under 30. “But I’ve never been divorced, so I’d probably never read this book.” Now, on a surface level that makes sense. Why read about something you know nothing about?
On a deeper level, there’s a big problem with that, especially if you are Wiccan and work with a coven. It’s even more problematic if you ever want to lead a coven. I’m not saying that anyone should or shouldn’t read the book – it wasn’t a party to write and it’s almost painful to know how fast it will be read given the 9 years it took to research and write it. But even for those who have never experienced divorce themselves, it’s relevant. At least, it’s relevant within the Wiccan religion. Also, reading is the first thing most of us are supposed to do when we know nothing about something. That’s how we take care of that “nothing” part.
Presumably, some of these Wiccans that have never been divorced are community leaders. 2nd and 3rd degrees that lead covens. Maybe they have friends outside the coven that come to them for spiritual needs, too. I certainly did the entire time I still practiced with a coven.
If you are leading a coven or assisting with spiritual needs… divorce is going to come up. Any competent clergy person has to have some understanding of the other person’s experience, even if that clergy person hasn’t gone through that experience him or herself. If you are sincere about serving the community as part of your priesthood you’re going to need SOME set of tools to deal with divorce. Not just your own divorce, should that happen. Believe me, divorce will happen in your community, it will happen to someone you know and it will happen more than once to someone you know. Not everyone will talk about their experiences and it won’t ever be the same experience from person to person. But someone in that mix will need your help – a priest/ess for a handparting ceremony, some advice on breaking the psychic ties. In nasty cases, protection magic plus some serious tailoring for a given situation.
Real priesthood – any religion – isn’t about showboating. It’s never about power. Oh, powerful people are chosen as priests – and they are chosen to serve. The people picked tend to have plenty of power with or without the witchcraft. Yes, Wicca is a very celebratory religion but it’s with the understanding that life will be serious for us from time to time. When that happens, it’s fine to be mirthful – but a good priest will still, with careful judgment and reason, help those going through a spiritual crisis.
So if you’re serious about attaining a 3rd degree elevation (if your tradition does that) or serious about using magic to make the world a better place, understanding how divorce impacts other Pagans and having a few tools to help those people along the way is a good idea. Maybe someone will read Divorcing a Real Witch, get all worked up, and present a much better set of ideas and assistance than what I’ve put forth. I think that would be awesome! Better material for better priests! Yes!
Ultimately, it’s the same conundrum as dealing with death. I’m sure most of these people have no idea what it’s like to die, either. If they are competent, responsible members of the priesthood they still have to do something to plan for a funeral service and maybe even get some grief counseling workshops along the way. Divorce is an extension of this same issue. A good clergy person of ANY religion must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Divorce will definitely become a huge part of that over the years for any priest/ess.
Tradition is a big deal among Pagans. Your tradition defines your religion, how you practice, what you practice, your morals – sometimes even your lifestyle. It’s divisive and inclusive all at the same time.
That way of casting a circle, that method of purification, that ritual for blessing an athame – there is more than one way to do all of those things. Do each one according to set words, set rituals – each one of those steps and choices makes up a tradition.
It’s also an artificial construct. None of these rules are divinely handed down. They are created by people, guided by the gods or not, to deal with immediate concerns. Sometimes the practice stays after the concern has gone. Sometimes it creates additional concerns.
I’ve always found the popularity of tradition in a religious grouping that cherishes so much nature peculiar. Tradition isn’t physics. It’s not about whether the magic works or not – it’s about upholding inventions that work until they don’tanymore. Some traditions, even among Pagans, go so far as to say things like “Christian prayer doesn’t have power,” or “Science will catch up to magic!” as part of their official beliefs. It’s strange, inappropriate to the big picture religious people ostensibly uphold. Sometimes it feels like the clamor for tradition has gotten so loud that few people actually practice any actual magic – it takes too much energy to practice a tradition instead.
I’ve always seen tradition as a double-edged sword.
It preserves. It also limits. Limitation can help set boundaries. It can also prevent learning when applied wrong.
The insistence that tradition matters isn’t appropriate to all situations. To insist on following a “tradition of my ancestors” would be as much of a disaster as declaring Christianity the state religion in the US. My ancestors did a lot of stuff that does not fly in the 21st century. It served then but just because it did doesn’t mean it applies to now. Oh, some stuff does – like pausing to remember the ancestors. But reliving their lives does not seem like a good way to learn anything.
To insist that one Wiccan tradition is more correct than the other also troubles me – it seems that if the gods show up, it’s not for the page justification or because the athame got dunked in the chalice just right.
Wiccan lottery winner Bunky Bartlett learned a few things the tough way when he actually hit the lotto. 5 years after his 2007 jackpot, he was down a few million but hadn’t lost everything. As he summarizes offering help and getting blamed for failure, he concludes “One of the mistakes I made was giving money to help other people realize their dreams instead of my own. “
This has become my mantra while navigating a Pagan world that wants me more now that I’m nearing 40, and navigating a professional life that is beginning to bear some carefully guarded fruit.
Put your own dreams first.
Because, really, we’re told story after story about how it’s good, and virtuous, and important to put the dreams of others first. Certainly kindness, sharing, and helping community members out are all good and virtuous things – but when we are sacrificing our entire good to help another person out (who may or may not be in a position to pay forward or return the kindness) we aren’t strengthening the Pagan community. We aren’t strengthening ourselves, improving our family’s lives, or making the world safer for Pagans.
We’re weakening it.
Some of the misleading ideology rife among us traces back to Christianized thinking – the tale of the widow’s mite stayed with me for many, many years into my Wiccan practice. Only in recent years did it occur to me that there is no follow-up to that tale of her giving her last two coins: it very likely ended VERY poorly for her. Jesus might have been pleased, but he also didn’t make any definite moves to protect her from starving to death or being thrown in debtors’ prison. Someone thinking well of you does not keep you well, although it can contribute if it’s a relationship you’ve built up over years. But for one hit scenarios where you never see the person again? That good opinion does very little. If you’ve ever seen a Presbyterian parking lot in Indiana, you know that not all Christians interpret this parable as literally as I did.
I’m part of the generation where conversion to Paganism usually came from an active life in another religion – and like most US Americans, it was conversion from some denomination of Christianity. Re-acculturating how I share resources and which I keep for myself is something I’ve never thought through as well as I should. For example, signing over your entire social security check to keep a Pagan resource center afloat may seem like a grand gesture, but it’s actually the worst kind of martyrdom (and martyrdom is A BAD THING.) You’re cheating yourself of much-needed resources that, managed well, ensure your future and your ability to live day to day. Yes, the Pagan movement needs some infrastructure, but you don’t build that infrastructure by ripping pieces off the foundation of your own house.
For those following my work with Money Drunk, Money Sober you already know it’s been a long road with lots of mistakes, and lots of childhood conditioning to overcome. While most Pagan traditions usually speak to a period of “stabilizing” or “Earth element work,” there is a tremendous amount of defeating crap, much of it rooted in a misunderstanding of money and its place, still woven into the Pagan acculturation process. What’s worse, is most of the absolute defeating crap is upheld as a value or a virtue. That’s as insidious as a bad thing can get.
It must be that time of year. A few folks have approached me in the past three months about teaching them about “Pagan religions,” and while I’m not averse to taking students, it’s a lot of energy for very little reward on my own part. I’m not someone who finds the “joy of teaching” a privilege or a reward … I find it a drain. A drain I rather resent. At the same time, there are people that come to me that really do need a teacher, who are like me and don’t fit with a tradition in the traditional sense, or who really just want to learn enough magic to do what they need to do to make their daily life functional. I don’t necessarily enjoy the approaches, but I also won’t turn away people who a)genuinely need some help b)are willing to make the changes to make that help matter (this is not the same as doing it my way, though those resistant to change might read it that way) and c)are mature enough not to blame me or project onto me when it comes to the fucked up religious and spiritual messages they’ve internalized over the years.
My requirements:
If you’re genuinely serious, compatible, and willing to commit, you must:
1)Complete the Artist’s Way. You don’t have to do it in the allotted 12 weeks, but you do have to do it. As you do the program, you will start to see why, yourself.
2)Complete Money Drunk/Money Sober – the less fucked up you are, the better you’ll do with any endeavor.
3)Present me with a proposed syllabus of what you aim to study after you have completed the first two requirements.
This will take you at minimum 6-9 months. And I would insist you do that before I even consider putting you on a dedicant year. And I don’t do it the way covens do with dedication leading to initiation. You do a dedicant year, and then you do a pre-initiate year, and THEN there’s initiation. My religion and magical practices are serious stuff that changed my entire life. I’m not going to fuck around with any Playgans.
I can initiate you into Wicca, but I have obtained no other initiations that I can confer. I am not associated with any traditions at this time because there are no Wiccan traditions that really fit who I am as a complete adult. There is no regulatory system determining what initiations are valid or are not, so if you go through all this with me and then move onto a coven, you’ll most likely have to go through their entire training system from the beginning as well – as you should. Wiccan traditions are not the same as simply being Wiccan.
If you ask my permission first, I will answer questions you have about Paganism. What teaching I do generally comes through writing. While I have in the past taken 1 on 1 students, I don’t normally.
Why I don’t take students in most cases
Why?
I’m following my new rule of looking to my own needs first. When you’re just starting out in Pagan study, or in anything, you don’t even think about the needs or realities of the people you want teaching you. That’s normal, and many react badly when they’re turned down because they want what they want for themselves so badly that it doesn’t occur to them that the person they want teaching them always has to do so at some personal cost that is physical, emotional, financial, and time-consuming.
My primary reason for turning away formal students right now:
I’m still looking for a suitable, on-my-level magical working partner. It’s my unicorn, my holy grail, my TARDIS. I’ve muddled along with working partners that I’ve had to teach, but you can’t have a wholly healthy friendship and spiritual connection with a person AND be their formal teacher – not until you’ve had a few years of space between teaching relationship and personal friend. Both my parents were public school teachers at various points in their lives, and it was visible to me every day how even twenty years after a kid graduated from high school, that power dynamic never faded. Right now there are bugaboos – if that person is in a coven that does oathbound stuff, inevitably something we’re doing will come into conflict and from my point of view, unnecessary, “those people are controlling assholes,” conflict. Of course I can’t know the other side other of the situation, and except when it comes to protecting the identity and safety of your fellow coveners or preserving the sanctity of initiation, most secrecy is a load of steaming bollocks. I’ve also been informed that my choice to be public about my Paganism risks making other coveners I’ve been involved with publicly identifiable – another load of steaming bullshit.
My experience with covens has led me to feel that for whatever reason, when I personally get involved with a coven I will be treated with disrespect and my voice will go unheard or be silenced when I do speak my mind. I am well aware this is not the case for other coven members, but this is how my two coven experiences have gone thus far, and I have zero interest in repeating that pattern further. So while I don’t object to a prospective partner being involved with a coven, I generally anticipate some coven-based interference that I’d rather not deal with.
You’re really just interested in dabbling
Don’t fucking waste my time. I don’t care if you don’t like reading books.
Your boyfriend/girlfriend is an asshole
Sadly, I’ve had to have students drop because they just couldn’t get their non-Pagan partner to trust them. The worst was the girl who was convinced I was out to have sex with her boyfriend. I do NOT have the bandwidth for that kind of drama, especially of the “I imagined it so it must be true,” kind of bullshit. If you’re in a relationship like that, you’re in a bad relationship, and you need to sort that out before you go pursuing a religious path that will alter your place in society.
You’re still focused on a previous religion, or you just want to piss someone off
My religio-magical practice is not petty, and is too important to constantly refer itself to Christianity, monotheism, or the usual patriarchal clutter. If you’ve got something to prove, don’t prove it to me – all you’ll do from my perspective is demonstrate yourself to be a jackass.
You don’t want to feel uncomfortable
There’s bad uncomfortable i.e. “I’m being taken advantage of” and “this is new” uncomfortable. You need to be mature enough to know the difference before you pursue any magical practice.
The vast majority of people that approach me fall in the “no” category for the above reasons. You need to demonstrate you’re serious, because otherwise, you’re not just treating the material dismissively – you’re treating me dismissively.I’ve had enough of that shit from people that were ostensibly my teachers in the past – I’m certainly not going to tolerate it from teachers OR students now.
It’s the reason I insist prospective students do the Artist’s Way first. This way they’re clear with themselves what they’re really trying to do, and since about 98% of the time Paganism is a possibility and not an answer, they can define their paths for themselves by following Cameron’s program. Honesty takes courage, and most people try to defer telling the truth which makes it worse and worse until it blows up. If you have the right attitude – “I want to learn, I won’t be good at everything, and I need to speak up right away if this isn’t right,” is hugely important in the spiritual work that I do.
And if you haven’t figured it out yet, if you’re just looking to smoke up and camp out with a bunch of hippies, I’m the wrong person.
:pv:
Last year heralded some of the most lively interaction to date on the Pagan Values blogject. So much that it even coaxed out some beginning bloggers. And it should! If you wish to blog about Paganism, you are talking about your values every day – there is no separating your values from who you are, after all.
To help people get even more out of their blogging experience during the Pagan Values project, here are a few do’s and don’t’s:
Do:
Don’t:
Fact: Dogs were domesticated from wolves. Notice that I embedded a link to a respected and accurate information source, PBS.
Opinion: Pop music sucks. It may very well suck to you, based on your inner neurology. But that’s not a fact (directs glare at my partner, who likes to do this to annoy his sibling.)
But I’m blocked!
That’s OK. This is Pagan Values month – but it’s not 30 days of blogging. Very few people have 30 posts on any one subject in them. Most aspects of Paganism involve work – and this is an expression of my personal value: if you’re going to do spiritual work, it should be work you take pleasure in. That can be hard work, or light work, but it must engage you. If you find this blogging process engaging, and find that it continues to be engaging, wonderful! If you find it stressful, then it’s OK to stop at one or two. If you’re afraid, then write down the reasons you’re afraid, and answer them with all the logic you can muster – and then celebrate it when you hit the publish button.
There are many other blogging trips and tips I’m happy to share over on the Facebook page. I’m an avid WordPress user, so I’m all about writing and scheduling posts out, using automatic methods of sharing, and creating in-text shortcuts so I can spend more time consistently writing new stuff. If you want to talk tech and toys, just open up a discussion on the Pagan Values Facebook group.
Happy blogging!
